Joining Intel Corp. in 1999 as a recent college graduate, David Freeman began his finance career as part of the tech giant’s plus-size finance team that supported various business groups. Looking back, Freeman finds that few aspects of the tech giant’s business were more influential in shaping his early career years than the company’s direct and “confrontational” culture.
“They expected excellence,” he recalls. “They expected details, and they expected you to know your business.”
Along the way, despite the many opportunities that Intel regularly offered him, Freeman came to realize that he wanted to open his next career door somewhere else.
“I didn’t really love being at a large company, so—after 7 years there—I decided that it was time to move on,” continues Freeman, who opted to join a pioneering cloud company known as NetSuite.
Read MoreAt fewer than 500 employees, NetSuite was aiming to be among the first SaaS companies to go public, and Freeman tells us that he ultimately had a hand in drafting the company’s S-1—a hands-on role that ultimately led him to spending 16- to 20-hour days at the printer.
However, Freeman believes that the greatest takeaways from his time at NetSuite may have come from the exposure that he had to the decision-making done by NetSuite’s CFO during the IPO process.
“For the first time, I could see day-in and day-out what the CFO did, and this really gave me kind of a better sense of the role,” he remembers.
We can see that as his career moved forward, Freeman’s pursuit of experience and opportunities left little doubt that he had the CFO office in mind as a destination. Still, when the head of sales at Nutanix invited him to step into a VP of Sales operations position, he didn’t hesitate to stray from what might have been a more traditional finance path.
Says Freeman: “To be honest, I really hadn’t thought about this type of role that much, but I kind of felt like, ‘Hey, if there’s ever a time to do it, why not now?'” –Jack Sweeney
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CFOTL: Tell us about Starburst … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Freeman: We’re an open data lakehouse. What this means is that we’re a data platform that allows companies to run fast and efficient analytics on large datasets across different data sources. In simple terms, we allow companies to access all of their data wherever it sits—whether in a data lake, in a data warehouse, or in source systems—and to access it in a very performative nature.
Just to give this some context, companies like Databricks and Snowflake approach similar problems in different ways. We are very much an open platform to which you don’t necessarily have to move your data—you can access your data wherever it sits. A lot of the benefit that we provide comes from being very cost-effective and performative relative to other solutions on the market.
Read MoreTo whom we sell really kind of shows a little bit about who we are because we are selling to companies that have either really complex data or lots of data sources or both. A big focus of ours right now is large enterprises. Seven of the 10 largest global banks are our customers, as are six of the 10 largest global pharma companies and four of the seven largest US telcos. These are obviously really large companies that need to access lots of data really quickly.
We’ve had some great new executives join us recently, including a new Head of Product. Very shortly, we will have a new executive who’ll be running sales and marketing. For me, right now, this is all really about helping to build our new executive team around its new members and helping them to get acclimated to the company so that we can all focus on growth. More than anything, the priority of our finance team is to support the company, support sales, support product, support growth. We have our SaaS product that we launched last year that is seeing really strong adoption progress, but we just need to continue to put more energy into this. We also need to continue to build out our systems and processes and structure so that whenever the IPO moment does come, our finance team is ready to run with it. jb
“Don’t try to know everything and be an expert in all aspects of finance. Rely on the experts in your organization and ecosystem and then empower them to increase the impact and expertise of your finance organization.” –David Freeman, CFO, Starburst
Starburst | www.starburst.io | Boston, MA